Compression Algorithms: Huffman to LZ77, DEFLATE, Arithmetic Coding, ANS and Zstandard

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 1h 2m

A fictional Montreal game studio has to ship a 60 GB update to twelve million players by Friday. Following its build engineer's benchmarks, we take apart how compressors trade size against speed and memory. Along the way: the Unisys LZW royalties that led to PNG, compression leaking encrypted cookies, a 10 MB zip that expands to 281 TB, and a backdoor in xz found because SSH logins were half a second slow.

Chapters

00:00:00 Cold open: sixty gigabytes by Friday

00:02:59 Two kinds of redundancy

00:04:33 Lempel and Ziv: pointers into the past

00:07:12 The patent that gave us PNG

00:09:23 Hash…